Well, some good news: the car has been fixed! Yay! It wasn’t too expensive either, I said that I was going to sell the car in a week and so my mechanic friend managed to find a second hand radiator from a scrapyard. (If we’d waited for a new one, it would have been next Monday before it arrived).
So that’s a relief – all that remains is to sell the car. Anyone want to buy a ‘V’ reg Hyundai Lantra which has done nearly 110,000 miles? Hmmm… maybe I should try autotrader :p
As I mentioned in the previous post, we we looking at buying a second-hand Saab 9-3. I was just waiting on the insurance premium quote to come back. Anyway, I did get the insurance quote back and it was OK, so we called up and made an offer on the car. We said we would be able to pick it up next weekend.
So far so good. That’s where the good part of the story ends, however. When I had the car MOT’d back in August, they said there was a problem with the radiator – it had a slow leak. While they patched it up for me, they said it might well need a new radiator putting in.
… guess when the radiator chooses to give up? Yes, that’s right: today! One week before selling the car. I was just driving it back from Halfords (where I was picking up a few bits and pieces to clean the car with), I noticed that the temperature gauge was going through the roof. Fortunately I was only about half a mile from home, so I managed to get back OK. When I stopped, I noticed a fair amount of water leaking out of the bottom.
D’oh. Looks like we’re going to have to get a taxi into church tomorrow. Looks like I’m going to have to get the bus into work this week… it seems fairly pointless getting the radiator replaced at this stage, but I think we’re going to have to because it’s just so inconvenient *not* having a car and working where I do (it’s about an hour on the bus, at inconvenient times).
Irony sometimes has a way of slapping you til it hurts :-(
First all, let me say – happy 2009! I hope it is a good year for you :)
Well, the past few days have gone by pretty quickly. Last Sunday, Phil and I travelled down to Kent to stay with Phil’s parents for a few days. We had a great time – very restful!
We also test drove a Saab 93… we went to see Julie and Dave, and as we were leaving Dave happened to ask whether we wanted to buy a car! So we went back on Wednesday morning on the way back home to give it a test drive. It was very nice, very smooth. Saabs are well put together cars generally, and it showed with the nice smooth ride and quiet interior. The only problem is, it has a bigger engine than our current car (it has a 2.0 Litre turbo) – which means it will be less fuel efficient. I don’t think it will make a huge difference depending on how you drive it, but it does have a good kick of speed if you need it.
Aaaanyway. On Wednesday evening we had a few people round for a New Year’s Eve party. Matthew, Ellie, Phil B, Anne-Marie, Sarah and Alex all came round. I think everyone had a good time – despite the rather hard quiz we made up!
And… I think that’s pretty much us up to date. I’m going to go into town later on to look at guitars… I may even go crazy and buy one! (Oh, the crazy mixed-up world we live in. Well, I live in at least).
This weekend was pretty quiet. Phil wasn’t feeling well last week, and she still wasn’t 100%, so she didn’t feel like doing too much. She is feeling much better now though, so I guess taking it easy must have had a positive effect!
(On a slightly related note, one other bit of good news is that the car is fine – it was just damp! Because I haven’t been using it too much, it got damp, meaning that it was over-fueling when I tried to start it. I didn’t figure all this out by myself!)
On Saturday we went into town and did a bit of shopping for random bits and pieces. I think I mentioned before that Phil bought me a guitar for Christmas… unfortunately it was only a nylon stringed one, and I wanted to have a steel stringed one. So I went back to the shop and exchanged it for another guitar, which I spent a while trying to play afterwards… at the moment, my level of expertise with the instrument could be called: “I don’t know how on earth anyone manages to play this without using a thimble!” The fingertips on my left hand are red, I didn’t realise just how much pressure you have to apply to the strings in order to push them down. Hopefully I’ll get some tougher skin on my fingertips soon…
On Saturday evening we watched Shrek 3, which was a good film although I agree with a few of my friends – it was lacking something which Shrek and Shrek 2 had. It was also quite short – only about 1h20, although I can’t remember how long the previous films were so maybe it’s similar.
On Sunday we went to church in the morning, and then didn’t do much for the rest of the day! So that was our weekend :-)
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